I have no skills in game development. I am simply trying to understand the challenges of modern game development. What goes wrong in the relationship between animators and programmers in a project such as Fallout 3. The animations and interactions between the character and his/her world are incredibly flawed in Fallout 3. The way the character model interacts with the environment is sloppy. Could anybody speculate on what causes these poor results. In contrast COD4 models interact with the environment very naturally. What is required of the dev team to get the most realistic and natural results in regards to character model environment interaction? -Mike

More limited interactions.

Less overall content, so more time can be spent polishing what's there.

Simpler overall game mechanics.

Thanks for the insights. So the consensus seems to be that it was a time issue in regards to the scope of the game that resulted in the lack of polish for Fallout 3 when compared to COD4.

Could there also be a talent issue or do most individuals employed by mainstream developers have the necessary talent and experience to polish up character animations and make them feel natural?

Animation is an incredibly complex problem. Even a simple character to move smoothly and naturally will need multiple blended keyframed and procedural animations. Couple this with the requirement that the limbs (arms,hands) and head have to naturally interact with a dynamic environment and you can see not just the technical challenge but also the programming challenge of how do you represent all those states? Game entities are simple things with few well defined states, but how do you represent something as fluid and transitory as animation states which usually are not just a simple binary state. People have carried animation engines over multiple console generations constantly refining and tweaking them, since they are too valuable and difficult to write just from scratch.

There is a move in the industry toward higher level procedural animations ( ie NaturalMotion, etc.. ) which is a combination of high level AI technology coupled with physics based modeling. More and more animation is moving away from keyframmed animation to a more dynamic procedural scheme as the processing power becomes available and new techniques are discovered.

-ddn

Quote:Original post by Hodgman

Quote:Original post by Zardoz
Could there also be a talent issue or do most individuals employed by mainstream developers have the necessary talent and experience to polish up character animations and make them feel natural?

If you look at any of Bethesda's 3D games, they all have relatively poor animations in them. It's just not their specialty it would seem.

Theirs always going to be trade offs between content quality and quantity and bethesda goes about as far in the quantity direction as you can and still be marketable.

Thanks for all the input. I now have some clarity on this subject. I definitely appreciate NaturalMotion used in GTA4 (correct?) If character animation is becoming a licensed third party technology which requires little input from the game developer it will allow the devs to focus on content and quality in other areas.

Now I wonder how affordable it is to license NaturalMotion tech since the budget and profit targets of GTA4 were unusual in comparison to most games. Will this tech only be available to the big players in the future?

Quote:Original post by Zardoz
Thanks for the insights. So the consensus seems to be that it was a time issue in regards to the scope of the game that resulted in the lack of polish for Fallout 3 when compared to COD4.

All games have parts which are not perfect due to time issues. Time is money.

Quote:Original post by Zardoz
Thanks for all the input. I now have some clarity on this subject. I definitely appreciate NaturalMotion used in GTA4 (correct?) If character animation is becoming a licensed third party technology which requires little input from the game developer it will allow the devs to focus on content and quality in other areas.

Not really, it just raises the bar for quality. You still have to do a lot of work to integrate middleware into your game and sometimes your game has to be altered significantly to fit the technology. Sometimes that means it's not worth the money and effort to improve a certain feature with such external technology if it's not crucial to your game's aesthetic.